by Marko Kloos
“Oh, shit,” the lieutenant says.
I scroll through the incoming messages my tactical computer buffered before the link went down. It’s a mess of burst transmissions on the priority fleet channel, encrypted ship-to-ship comms that are illegible to my tactical computer and its limited access level.
“Try to raise Company,” I tell the lieutenant. “I’ll check in with Fleet over voice.”
I open a channel on the fleet emergency band, override the EMCON protocols of my comms suite, and crank my transmitter up to full power.
“Manitoba, this is Tailpipe Five. Do you read, over?”
For a moment, all I get in return is static. Then the reply comes down from the Manitoba, and going by the barely restrained panic in the voice of the comms operator in CIC, things have gone very wrong indeed.
“Tailpipe Five, kindly keep out of the ship-to-ship emergency comms. We are under attack. Manitoba out.”
I hear a crescendo of overlapping alarm klaxons in the background before the transmission ends.
“The fleet is under attack, sir,” I tell the lieutenant. “I have no clue what’s going on up there, but it sounds like they’re in deep shit.”
Then the fleet TacLink comes back to life, and another burst transmission scrolls across my screen, colored in the crimson red of high-priority TacLink updates.
“ALL GROUND UNITS ABORT CURRENT OBJECTIVES AND ASSUME DEFENSIVE POSTURES. TASK FORCE IS ENGAGED. ABORT RPT. ABORT ALL INBOUND TRAFFIC TO MANITOBA.”
I tap into the newly established link to our carrier and call up the CIC’s situation display. It takes much longer than usual—all the data nodes between the task force units are exchanging massive bursts of data, and there’s no bandwidth left for non-priority data traffic. Fifteen seconds after I send my request, the tactical plot on the Manitoba’s main CIC screen unfolds on my helmet display, and I feel myself getting nauseous with fear.
The task force is scattering before a new arrival in orbit, but the newcomer’s tactical icon is not the red symbol of an SRA capital ship. Instead, it’s blaze orange.
High up in the sky, more nuclear explosions are blooming, like short-lived new suns. By now, NAC troopers and Chinese civvies alike are looking up at the fireworks, none of them aware of the magnitude of the new threat.
Finally, I find my voice again.
“Lankies,” I say over the platoon channel. “It’s a fucking Lanky seed ship.”
CHAPTER 11
“Well, that’s a shitty end to this day,” the platoon sergeant says.
I can’t help but chuckle at what has to be the understatement of the decade. Everyone is cross-talking on the platoon channel, so I open a private channel to the lieutenant.
“LT, we need to call the drop ship down and get the fuck off this rock, right now.”
“Orders say to sit tight and go defensive,” the lieutenant replies. “If that’s a Lanky ship up there, we’d climb right up into the middle of a shootout.”
“Look.” I splice off the feed from the Manitoba’s CIC and send it through the private data link. Our fleet units are splitting two ways, like the small SRA task force we engaged earlier. The carrier and one of the destroyer escorts are moving out of orbit, away from the Lanky ship, and the Hammerheads and the space control cruiser are shielding the Manitoba’s retreat. The space between our ships and the advancing Lanky seed ship is a sea of missile icons—the three cruisers are emptying their magazines at the new arrival. Together, they carry a few dozen megatons of nukes, enough firepower to turn a small moon into an irradiated wasteland, but Lanky seed ships are incredibly tough, and nukes aren’t a quarter as effective in hard vacuum as they are in a planetary atmosphere.
“They’re trying to make the chute, and the cruisers are going to buy them time. If we’re still dirtside in another five minutes, they’ll be out of reach, and we’ll be breathing CO2 in another month. They won’t come back, sir. They won’t risk another task force for a lousy regiment or two. You know it.”
“They get blown out of space, we die with them, Sarge.”
“They make Alcubierre, we’re safe. Otherwise, we’re dead, one way or the other. It’ll just take a few days longer, that’s all.”
“Fuck.” The lieutenant doesn’t deliberate for long before he cuts the private link and speaks up in the platoon channel.
“All right, cut the yapping. We are bugging out. Mark a spot for the bird. We’re getting out of here while we can. Banshee Two-Five, come on down for evac.”
“Copy that. ETA thirty seconds.”
We mark a clear spot for the drop ship and wait for our taxi, mindful of the Chinese civilians who are still loitering on the perimeter, unsure of the sudden burst of activity on our side. With my TacLink, I have a real-time picture of the battle overhead, and knowing the extent of our troubles, the thirty seconds until the arrival of our drop ship feel like three weeks. Then Banshee Two-Five comes descending out of the darkening blue sky, makes one low pass overhead to eyeball the landing spot, and sets down gracefully right on top of our markers.
I’m part of the rear guard, and I keep my weapon trained on the Chinese civvies as the first half of our decimated contingent runs over to board the Wasp. In front of me, I see forty or fifty locals in the narrow streets beyond the ruined admin building. Most of them are just watching us, but some of them have worked up the courage to yell insults or throw debris in our direction.
You poor bastards, I think. Survived our guns and our bombs, and now you’re all going to die anyway, either by Lanky nerve-gas pods or by choking like fish on dry land.
I don’t speak enough Chinese to inform them of their fate, but even if I knew more than the few phrases we learned in fleet training—stuff like stop, surrender, go fuck yourself—I wouldn’t take the time to tell them. They’ll know soon enough, if the nukes going off in high orbit didn’t already make things clear. We don’t use atomic arms against the SRA, and they don’t use them against us, because it’s bad policy to start irradiating the very same resources you’re fighting over. The only time we use nuclear warheads is when we go up against the Lankies.
“Second element, move, move, move!” the platoon sergeant calls out. I trust the other half of the platoon to watch my rear, and turn around to run for the tail ramp of the drop ship idling a hundred meters away. In the pile of rubble to my right, the bodies of our platoon mates still lie buried and unclaimed, in the spots that will have to serve as their graves until we can come back to reclaim Sirius Ad from the Lankies, who will own the place completely in another month.
I run up the ramp, strap into a seat in the cargo hold, and look out of the back of the Wasp. As the tail ramp rises up, my last view of Sirius Ad is that of a gaggle of Chinese civvies swarming over the rubble that was their government’s local outpost, and it feels like I’m leaving a prison full of death row inmates, with the executioner striding into the place just as I’m walking out.
While we’re climbing back into orbit, I have nothing to look at except for gray-painted bulkhead, and nothing to do but to tighten my seat straps, so I stay glued to the tactical screen. The battle overhead is a shootout between profoundly unequal adversaries, our best technology employed against an enemy so advanced that we might as well be hurling rocks and sticks instead of twenty-megaton warheads for all the damage we’re failing to do. Our cruisers are between the Lanky ship and the retreating carrier, pumping out salvo after salvo of antiship missiles, but the trajectory of the seed ship isn’t changing as it shrugs off our warheads. The Manitoba and her two escorts are leaving the neighborhood at maximum acceleration, but the Lanky ship has a lot of momentum, and the cruisers aren’t even slowing it down.
We climb into low orbit at full throttle, but our progress feels agonizingly slow. With every minute our ship is clawing for more altitude, the carrier and her bodyguards are increasing the distance. When I finally feel the weightlessness of orbital flight lifting me out of my seat and into the harness straps, the Manitob
a is almost a quarter million kilometers away. The Lanky seed ship is much closer.
“Ain’t no way we’re going to catch up,” the crew chief says to us from his jump seat by the forward bulkhead. “Not unless they slow down a bit and let us close the gap.”
“If we don’t, we’ll just go back dirtside,” Lieutenant Benning replies. “Can’t get fucked much worse than we are right now anyway.”
As if on cue, the pilot chimes in on the intercom.
“Brace for evasive.”
The ship pitches and rolls in the low gravity. We’re blind and deaf in the cargo hold, unaware of the threat that made the pilot put the craft into an evasive pattern, and the lack of control and awareness is almost worse than being stuck in a bad firefight. I scan the shipboard data nodes, and tap into the Wasp’s external video feed. For a few moments, I see nothing but distant stars careening across the dorsal camera’s field of view, but then the pilot straightens out our trajectory, and the feed of the wide-angle lens shows a piece of the battle in progress nearby.
Off our starboard bow, one of the Hammerhead cruisers is in a spin, bleeding air and frozen fluids out of hundreds of holes in its outer hull. Just beyond the cruiser, the massive bulk of the Lanky seed ship pushes its way through the hastily erected blocking position. The Lanky ship is enormous, a glistening oblong shape that looks like a cross between a seedpod and a rifle bullet. It dwarfs our cruisers, which look like sparrows trying to attack an eagle. I know that a Hammerhead is almost four hundred meters long, and the seed ship looks to be at least five times that size. I’ve seen drone shots of the seed ships in many intel briefings, but this is the first time I am looking at one through a direct camera feed, and the sight of it makes me want to crawl into my armored boots. All three of our cruisers are tattered, with hull damage I can spot even through the fish-eye lens of the dorsal camera from hundreds of klicks away, but the Lanky ship has no visible scars on its seamless black flanks. The Hammerheads are our newest capital ships, supermodern fleet defense cruisers that can hold their own against an entire SRA task force, but the Lanky seed ship just brushed two of them aside without even putting on the brakes.
The pilot changes our trajectory to catch up with our fleeing carrier, and the new camera angle points away from the Lankies and into the space between Sirius Ad and our clandestine Alcubierre transition point. I’m not an astrogator, but I can read movement vectors and do some relative speed calculations in my head, and it’s pretty clear that the crew chief is right—there’s no way we’ll catch up with the Manitoba and her escorts, and our pilot is pushing the Wasp as fast as it will go already. Our carrier is running away at full acceleration, trying to make Alcubierre before the Lanky seed ship catches up and hammers our hundred-thousand-ton flagship into scrap.
“What a fucked-up day,” the platoon sergeant says to no one in particular.
Without the hint of a warning, the rear cargo door of the drop ship disintegrates. The concussion of an impact slaps through the ship like the shock wave of a grenade. Something fast and superheated tears through the troop compartment from back to front and then bores through the bulkhead on my right. There’s violent decompression in the cargo hold as all the air gets vented through the wound in the drop ship’s outer hull. My suit automatically seals itself and turns on its own oxygen feed as I get whipped around in the straps of my seat. The back of my head makes contact with the hull behind me, and even with the padding of my helmet, the impact is enough to make me see red stars in front of my eyes. The sudden chaos in the cargo hold is complete—everything that wasn’t strapped down is getting blown around. With the air gone, there’s no sound coming from my external audio feed, and the silence lends a surreal quality to the event. When my vision returns and my world slows its spin, I reach for the rifle next to my seat out of pure habit, only to find that my M-66 has disappeared, torn from its storage bracket.
The cargo hold is a scene of utter carnage. Whatever blew through the rear hatch tore through the ship from tail to nose at a slight angle from right to left of our centerline. Bits and pieces of bulkhead armor, seats, webbing, and people are rushing past my eyes on their way out of the rear of the ship. I look to my left to see that we are trailing a comet tail of debris and frozen oxygen. The row of seats across the aisle from me is no longer there, and neither are the people who were strapped into them just a few moments ago. Half the cockpit bulkhead to my right is torn away, and instead of seeing into the drop ship’s galley and head that should be beyond the shattered bulkhead, I look into empty space. The armored door to the cockpit is gone, and the area in front of it looks like we ran nose-first into the Manitoba’s armor belt at top speed. From the movement of the stars beyond the massive holes in our hull, I can tell we’re in a spin.
Some of the troopers are calling for help on the comms now, but everyone’s cross-talking, yelling and shouting in shock and fear. The cargo bay has two rows of seats, one on each side, and I’m near the front of the starboard side. The entire rear half of the starboard-side seat row has been torn out of the ship, with nothing but mangled metal and shredded hull lining remaining where the Lanky projectile plowed through the Wasp. Half the port-side seats are gone as well, everything from the wing roots in the middle of the ship all the way to the cockpit bulkhead. Sheer luck of the draw has placed me in one of the spots that didn’t get pulverized by millions of foot-pounds of kinetic energy. In the long run, it won’t matter—the ship is destroyed, and we’re in a very high orbit over Sirius Ad. All our fleet units are either engaged in battle, destroyed, or running away from the Lankies, and there’s nobody out there to stop and pluck me out of the wreckage.
Against my better knowledge, I toggle into the pilots’ intercom channel.
“Banshee Two-Five, you copy?”
There’s no answer, of course. I strain forward in my seat straps, unwilling to release the harness lock and risk getting flung out of the back of the ship, and peer around the corner of the doorway in the cockpit bulkhead. The armory nook is still there, and the right side of the cockpit looks relatively undamaged, but the left side has been hammered into a pulp. The left seat is missing altogether, and the right seat is occupied by a pilot who is slumped over sideways in his seat. His head is gone, along with most of his neck, and little frozen blood bubbles are drifting out of the smashed cockpit and into space like a cloud of tiny pink balloons.
“Headcount,” one of the squad leaders says on the platoon channel. “Sound off if you’re still alive.”
I check my tactical screen for suit telemetrics and find that I’m one of four people still alive in the cargo hold. There are two more still strapped into their seats, but their vitals are flat—a suit that didn’t seal in time, a piece of high-velocity shrapnel through the helmet. Half a dozen live troopers are floating in space outside the hull, getting left behind like dumped cap-ship garbage as the Wasp’s inertia carries it further out of orbit.
“Grayson here,” I reply. “Check your oxygen levels and hang on to something solid. I’ll try to get Fleet on emergency comms.”
“For what it’s worth,” the squad sergeant sends back. “Hope they hear you. I got two hours of air in my suit.”
I check my own oxygen supply, and it’s not much better. Three hours and thirteen minutes at present rate of consumption, the suit’s computer informs me in unnecessarily precise fashion. The tanks in our suits are low-capacity reserves designed for emergencies in hard vacuum, like a drop-ship hull breach on descent, but the designers assumed that rescue units would be close by. Battle armor makes lousy extra-vehicular activity gear—the joint seals aren’t the sturdiest, and a nick from an enemy fléchette means that your three-hour supply of air becomes a five-minute supply. The bug suits have much bigger oxygen systems because they’re designed for fighting on high-CO2 Lanky worlds, but my own bug suit is in a locker in my berth on the Manitoba, which is now almost half a million kilometers away.
I fire up my comms suite again, turn the transmitte
r to full power, and start broadcasting the news of our impending death.
“All fleet units, all fleet units. This is Tailpipe Five on Banshee Two-Five, type Wasp. We have suffered a catastrophic hull breach and are coasting ballistic. Both pilots are casualties. We have four survivors in the hull, and six more outside. Declaring an emergency.”
I listen for a reply, but all I hear is the hiss of an unused carrier wave. I repeat the broadcast three more times, but nobody out there is willing or able to respond.
“Well,” the squad sergeant says. “That’s that, then.”
“Anyone have any weapons left?” one of the other survivors asks.
“Yeah, Goodwin. I got my rifle,” the sergeant replies. “Why, what are you going to do with that fucking pellet gun out here?”
“I got two and a half hours of air left,” Goodwin says. “Two hours and twenty-nine minutes comes around, I’m gonna borrow your rifle for a second if you don’t mind, Sarge.”
“I’ll be dead by then, girl. You’re welcome to it at that point.”
“’Preciate it, Sarge,” Goodwin says with lighthearted politeness, as if the sergeant had just agreed to trade z-ration desserts with her.
“What a fucked-up day,” the sergeant says, echoing the words of the platoon sergeant who was sitting across the aisle from me, and who probably died in a millisecond when the Lanky penetrator rod tore through the ship.
We drift in the darkness in silence, reflecting on that epitaph. I conclude that as far as last words go, the platoon sergeant did pretty well.